Smart TV
But do they always have to end up unveiled as beautiful swans?
It’s the stuff of every teenage girl’s fantasy – to be a smart, socially inept, physically awkward little thing, smashing school exams but clinging to the wall at the disco, only then to be discovered by a modelling agency, transformed into a magazine-cover beauty and become an icon of the catwalk.
It happened in real life to author Holly Smale, and now her bestselling Geek Girl series of novels, inspired by this unlikely tale, has come to Netfix with a suitably appealing Emily Carey in the title role of Harriet Manners.
One minute Harriet is dropping books and being picked on in the school corridor, the next she’s the subject of a million-dollar fashion campaign and batting eyelashes with an equally gorgeous young prince of the couture houses. As Harriet tells us from the off, “This is a story for anyone who’s ever wanted to be different” – even if not everyone gets to win such an Olympic gold for transformation.
Smale told RT that Harriet was the big sister she’d always needed herself, a voice in her head saying it would all be OK. She also said hundreds of fans had written to reveal how Harriet had inspired them and made them feel better about standing out from the crowd.
Which is great, but it does make me wonder: how did they miss all those other geek girls, those bookish, bright but self-doubting heroines of the small screen, from Anne of Green Gables to Lisa Simpson?
When Harriet reads out a def inition of “geek” as “someone who is obsessive about an interest or hobby, especially computers”, many women come to mind – characters from The Big Bang Theory, Phoebe Buffay from Friends, Veronica Mars, Dana Scully in The X-Files, Velma in Scooby-Doo, and my favourite, Neighbours’ resident bespectacled boffin Jane Harris – or, to give her full name, Plain Jane Superbrain.
BUT I HAVE a few issues with this business. With so many of them, and so many fans out there lapping up their stories, it’s hardly outlier territory, is it? As Smale said herself, “Geeks have always ruled the world and will continue to do so.” The problem comes when all narrative roads lead to the inevitable Disneyesque transformation in the third act, proving that a) these smart, independent young women can be tempted away from their study of dinosaurs or Dyno-Rods with one beckoning finger of a popular rugby player, and b) they were clearly beautiful all along. As Neighbours��
